# Gnutella

9 Hacker News commenters recommended Gnutella and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Early peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that still runs, praised for its innovation and for scaling to large networks, though critics say its search was slow and scaled poorly.

## Why people recommend it

- Worked well at scale (2 comments): "It was not perfect, but it worked enough to scale to very large user counts." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50165666)) "Gnutella was great on the gigabit intranet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48098044))
- Innovative, ahead-of-its-time design (2 comments): "Gnutella developers created huge innovations and would have continued to do so if not sued out of existence." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48282211)) "The network still lives, even today. This is so underrated." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097551))

## What people warn about

- Slow queries and poor scaling (3 comments): "it had some pretty major issues with speed of queries and scaling to millions of users" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269043)) "The main issue with Gnutella was - IIRC - that it didn't scale." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270059)) "broadcast search approach limited scalability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239841))
- Weaker than BitTorrent (3 comments): "The problem with Gnutella was that it was always slower than the direct competitor" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48276304)) "it had a lot of downsides as a protocol that BitTorrent improved on" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268787)) "the cost/benefit of the Gnutella architecture wasn't there" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268928))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [BitTorrent](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bittorrent.md): 50 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Gnutella", https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnutella/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).